Carmelita Tropicana (aka Alina Troyano) is a writer and performer who straddles the worlds of performance art and theater, using irreverent humor and fantasy as subversive tools to challenge cultural stereotypes and rewrite history from multiple perspectives. By performing hyperbolic feminine and masculine personas, as well as numerous animals, insects, and fantasy creatures, she challenges historical and narrative authority.
She creates multimedia spectacles and reviews with her long-time collaborators Ela Troyano and Uzi Parnes. Her most recent work, Give me Carmelita Tropicana!, was a critically acclaimed theater collaboration with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins produced by Soho Rep in 2024. The show was twice extended.
Tropicana has been the sole author of works including a podcast memoir commissioned by Soho Rep titled That’s Not What Happened; Milk of Amnesia, a solo included in the Handbook of LatinX Art and The Drama Review; the futuristic play Chicas2000; and With What Ass Does a Cockroach Sit? published in Animal Acts: Performing Species Today. Tropicana’s work has been written about extensively including a work written by queer theoristJose Esteban Munoz in his seminal book Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics.
At MacDowell in 2016, she worked Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! and Schwanze-Beast. She also finished her Guggenheim application for her proposed project Live Memoir, which she worked on during her 2025 residency with her collaborator and sister, the film maker Ela Troyano.
